I wasnt intending to be pejorative when I wrote the post and when I look back, that is how it reads.

Heres my last shot at what I was trying to say and apologies to Steve as well; its true that some threads shamble on like the mummy, but in all fairness to the mummy, some posts are deeper than you think when you make the post. Questions related to how an artistic community relates to cash flow and industry is very deep indeed, and always worth a little extra stirring about.

What struck me and drew the comment to Alan was the fact that all the arts that I know of are supported at the professional level by advertising. In dance, for example, a touring company mounting full length works (i.e. lots of sets, costumes and transport costs) covers only about 60% of its expenses with ticket sales. The rest is rich moguls cutting checks, a bunch of guys just like you and me contributing our widows mite, and Rolex presents an evening with Cynthia Gregory.

Were all ad salesmen to some extent, if you want to look at it that way.

But heres an honest and respectful question: is there any real difference between linking an ad banner to your b@$g and printing a banner ad at the top of your handbill or playbill when youre putting on a live show? By selling ad space or preceding a show with Obnoxico presents do we ever stop being artists? I never felt that I had any but the one profession: go out and make people glad they bought the ticket. And then get paid.

For me, the ad salesman will always be the guy at the ad firm selling the service of buying the space, or in the ISP world, they guy selling the service of linking to an ad to a page of content. I couldnt be less interested in how the house gets rented, as long as there are butts in seats.

Name: Steve Barber Source: unca20080511.htmMy father is in town to attend my uncle's funeral. Last evening I handed him my copy of THE TERROR, telling that as an old Navy man he might kinda' like it.

He's already 50-plus pages in.
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Oddly enough, it looks like someone at Youtube objected to my posting Harlan's comments. No explanation or email, but it's gone this morning. I may repost a link to this site instead.
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ADAM-TROY: I read your comments on on your SFF.net blog regarding Judi's recovery, including this morning's reference to Uma Furman's lap-leap. Are you not aware that this is how they invented the cat-apult???
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Lastly, and I've fought with myself over posting this, as well as whether it belongs in the Forums instead of here on the Pav, but I'm going to post it and take whatever comes my way.

When my uncle died both Cris and I were at his side. He died at home. In the nearly five hours it took for the Neptune Society to collect the body I had occasion to go back into the room. Toward the mid-afternoon the sun had begun to peek into the window by the side of his bed and accentuated the post-mortem gray tones of his skin, while at the same time the white sheets and pillowcase reflected a bright glow against the wall behind his head.

God help me I wanted to take a picture. It sounds (and felt) gruesome, and it sickens me that this was my reaction, but I really, honestly and truly wished I'd had my camera. Not because it was newsworthy, not because I wished to record one last and final image of my uncle, but because the composition was so interesting. I was sickened that I thought it, even AS I thought it, but it was there, undeniably, scratching at the back of my mind.

I have told no one but Cris, and her response was unrepeatable.

The topic I'm presenting is not "am I a bad person?", but rather "has this completely inappropriate response ever happened to any of the rest of you?".

I'm glad you had this kind of closeness with your uncle. The readiness of your visual instincts at that moment - I think - kind of reflected the rapport you'd had with him; you've this enrooted reflex to capture the moment, and angles and light are always a part of that moment. I've a notion that you'll remember this moment by that image. It'll probably remain an important image to you.

Name: shagin Source: unca20080511.htmSteve B. wrote: "The topic I'm presenting is not "am I a bad person?", but rather "has this completely inappropriate response ever happened to any of the rest of you?"."

Yes, I have had that very sme reaction (though pining for a pencil, pen, crayon, stick and mud pot, with which to record the thoughts and images of the moment).

Having said that, consider yourself lovingly and soundly thumped for seeing that as an inappropriate reaction. You are a photographer, Steve, a man with an towards cutting a moment out of time and pasting it to a strip of film whether to preserve that moment as a memory of what was or an imaginative interpretation of what might have been. How can you think that those sensibilities would be any less potent when presented with a stressful situation? You weren't thinking of stripping the body and pursuing lewd positioning. You found a moment of contrast, something striking that caught your eye, and reacted to it as you would have if you'd experienced a visually unique opportunity at any other point. Your response was not inappropriate any more than someone unconciously seeking comfort in the familiar during a stressful situation.

Don't berate yourself, hate yourself, or think less of yourself as a nephew or a human being. If even once your uncle thought positively about your photography, accept the moment as something you may one day be able to look back on and see as a diamond instead of a stone.

Name: Steve Jarrett Source: unca20080511.htmI just wanted to mention that there is a middle ground between what might be called vanity blogging and what might be called professional blogging. Some years ago I used to write a self-syndicated newspaper column called "Vintage Video." The premise was that I would mention a current film and then recommend older films with a similar theme, setting, etc., that could be found on home video. I even wrote one column about Unca Harlan's work. (And when I sent him a clipping for his files, he was nice enough to track down my phone number and call me up to thank me.)

A couple of months ago it occurred to me that I could start up a blog as a repository for all those old columns. So I went to blogger.com, set up a blog at no charge, dropped in some ads, and started uploading the columns. My thinking was that, at worst, it was a way to provide access to the columns to some friends, and, at best, it might earn some pin money, as opposed to allowing the columns to just gather dust, doing no one any good.

So there's a case where the words in question had already been published and paid for, and now I'm just using the blog, with ads, as a secondary market. The income, so far, has been minimal, but that's more or less what I expected. I'm sure there are many other similar uses for blogs that represent various gradations between doing it strictly on an amateur basis and blogging professionally.

(If you're curious and/or hard up for something to do, the url is vintagevideo.blogspot.com)

Name: Michael D. Blum Source: unca20080511.htmHey gang - I haven't been posting here very much over the last year, due to being chin-deep in the theatre biz, trying to wrap up all my projects prior to moving to Seattle - but our pal David Loftus informed me yesterday that my talented and brilliant daughter Asae, at the tender age of 23 and hot off her recent production here of Luis Alfaro's "Electricidad," has just been tapped to direct a production of "Julius Ceasar" for the Portland Actors Ensemble, the self-same group with which David has had such fun and success! I'm so proud I could bust!

The show goes up in June... get-together, anyone? First round's on me...

Many years ago I was shooting a student film in a park in Redlands, California. I had a cast of three dancers from a local college, and a ten year old kid. For crew there was just myself and an old high school buddy, shooting super-8. It was close to five in the evening, the light was getting golden - magic hour. I was pleased with what I was shooting, but concerned about the work that remained to be done before dark.

The park was built on a sloping hill, bounded by surface streets. At the top of the hill was a road that ran the length of the park and then off into tract house neighborhoods. Inside the park was full of gorgeous, mature trees. A very pretty location to film, but tricky because the place was busy. This was on a Sunday. Lots of people were barbequing and having picnics.

At one point I was explaining to my little troupe of actors what we were going to shoot next, when some guy on a motorcycle went racing along the street at the top of the hill - very fast. Very LOUD. My buddy said later he thought maybe the bike had glass packs. I don't know about such things, but it was much too loud, anywhere in the park, to speak. So I fiddled with my camera for a moment.

Thus I did not see, only heard, the impact. What was reported to me was that a lady in a VW bug had come up a street perpendicular to the road at the top of the slope, and pulled into the intersection just as the rider roared in.

They hit with such force that the Plexiglas windshield on the bike shattered into tiny grains. The VW bug spun a 360 completely out of the intersection and up onto a neighbors lawn. The noise of the impact after the roar of the bike was like the exclamation point after a drawn-out scream.

I looked up and saw the aftermath. The rider had landed twenty yards past the impact site. Perfectly still in the road. There was a moment of silence, and then...

Okay, this is drawn-out but it's the only way I can describe it: when I was very young we had a book of home science experiments that kids can do to learn basic principles of physics and such. One of these was to demonstrate surface tension on water. You would fill a cereal bowl with water and sprinkle pepper on top. The pepper would float in little random constellations. The next step was to stick a little piece of soap into the water. The soap would break the surface tension and the pepper would scoot to the perimeter of the bowl.

That's what happened in the park. The surface tension broke. It was like the accident was a piece of soap and the people were pepper. Everyone ran away.

Except, for reasons I really cant explain, I ran towards the crash. What I thought I was going to do I dont know. I knew CPR, but even just from hearing the noise it was pretty obvious that this was going to be more than a CPR situation. But I ran up to the road. And I was first on scene.

The guy was a big, white dude. No shirt. No helmet. Looked like he drank a fair amount of beer. He was on his back. Very still. A trickle of blood from his nose. He didnt seem to be breathing. I was pretty sure he was dead.

As I walked up I realized I was still carrying my super-8 camera. And yeah, Inappropriate Thought #1 leapt into me head: I could film this. I really wish I hadnt thought it, but I did.

I knelt down to try to check the guys pulse. My pulse-checking experience to that point was basically zero, and I was scared shitless, but I reached out and touched his neck. At my touch, the guy jackknifed upward. Blood sprayed out of his mouth and nose.

Okay, not dead (Im no genius, but I learn).

Three or four other guys joined me around the injured rider. I dont remember them arriving. Suddenly they were just there. Someone said 911 had been called. Meanwhile the riders mouth was filling with blood and he was beginning to choke. All of us in the group around him had a very quiet, very intense conversation. Went like this:

GUYS ON MY SIDE OF THE RIDER: Hes drowning, we have to help him breathe.

GUYS ON THE OPPOSTE SIDE: Hes bleeding like that because hes torn to pieces inside, if we move him well kill him.

Very quickly the group consensus was that the drowning threat was the most immediate. We laced our arms underneath him to try to support his insides, and tipped him to one side. Blood and pieces of meat poured out.

This seemed to help. The rider became semi-conscious. He moaned and waved his arms kinda feebly.

I tell you this whole long story really only to let you know this: from the time I knelt beside the guy, through everything that followed till the ambulance arrived, including the moment when his wife showed up and started screaming No!!! just like in the movies, the thought that ran over and over through my head was: Im losing my light. Im losing my light. This asshole is making me lose my light.

You cant control what your brain tosses up at you. You can only control what you do about it.

"JohnE, that blog entry on No Country For Old Men was not clever at all: it just proved that Bob Gale does not know how to pay attention when watching a movie. I won't bore anyone by picking his essay apart line by line, except for two items that prove his cleverness must have just been drowsiness while watching a movie he happened to not like... A professional writer should be a little more observant before criticizing a film for logic."

Todd,

I specifically wrote "I have not seen the film, so I can't comment on the piece other than to express my amusement" because I wanted to be clear that I did not take Mr. Gale's comments to be a reliable or definitive take on the film. Thus, I have no opinion as to whether NO COUNTRY deserved to be picked on based on its merits. (I suspect it does, because I have heard similar criticisms about the film elsewhere. But that is neither here nor there.)

I enjoyed Mr. Gale's review because I enjoy seeing bad art eviscerated. Again, I'm not sure whether NO COUNTRY is bad art, but then I've never read LAST OF THE MOHICANS, and one of my favorite essays of all time is "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" by Mark Twain. If you've read the piece then you know where I'm coming from -- it's a hilarious work of genius whether you've read Cooper or not.

Now, you submit that Gale picked on the illogic of NO COUNTRY because he didn't "happen to like" it. I think we can glean that Mr. Gale more likely didn't "happen to like" NO COUNTRY because of his problems with its illogic. In any case, he is clearly engaging his skills as a professional writer by bringing them to bear on a piece of work he finds inadequate, in an amusing manner, and that is something I admire on its own terms. That seems to be also the view of Ken Levine (also a professional writer), who hosted the review and knew it would cause some trouble. (See the comments at the site; one poster retorted that the Flux Capacitor was more illogical than anything in NO COUNTRY, which was the second most entertaining thing I read in that blog post.)

My apologies to Mr. Cassell and Mr. Coil and to anyone else who could have done without me posting said link here. I wouldn't have given it a second thought except that it reminded me a lot of Harlan's OUTLAND review and it seemed like something that might be enjoyed here for that reason.